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Comment by shevy-java | Hacker News Reader

I've had various issues installing Void so I succumbed to Manjaro, which works surprisingly well. I have noticed in general that many non-systemd distributions work less well over time for some reason. Slackware is the best example - one release per decade means it is factually dead, but even trying more modern variants simply no longer works as it once used to work. At the same time there is less and less adapted documentation to be found. It seems the non-systemd distributions not only declined in absolute numbers but also in regards to manpower and time investment. MX Linux also lags behind updating versions of numers programs: https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=mx - it has gotten a bit better after libretto, but it still lags behind compared to e. g. Fedora.

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The thing where Void really stands out in my opinion is "hackability" and providing an inviting on-ramp for making certain kinds of customizations that would be intimidating in terms of their complexity in other distros. -- I don't use it as a daily-driver desktop.

For example, I have a chroot'able tarball providing all dependencies for all software I write that runs on a server. I build that tarball myself from source in an airgapped environment. (I had been doing something like this, minus the airgapping, with Gentoo from about 2012 until 2024). I looked for a replacement for Gentoo in 2024 and landed on Void. Most of the time when I do a build, I just pull the latest commit from the repo, and it "just works", even though Void is not even advertising itself as a source-based distro. Sometimes it breaks because of the distro itself (just like Gentoo used to). But, with Void it has always been so much easier to diagnose and fix issues, and the project is also quite inviting to merging such fixes. With Gentoo, it had always been quite painful to deal with the layers of complexity pertaining to Gentoo itself, rather than any package that has decided to break. Void, on the other hand, has managed to avoid such extra complexity.

Lately, I've started to play around with Void's tool for creating the live installer ISO. It's quite malleable and can easily be repurposed for building minimalist live/stateless environments for pretty much any purpose. I'm using that to create VM guests to isolate some contexts for security-purposes like a "poor man's Qubes OS" kind of thing.

There's an old presentation from late 90s or early 2000s where Linus talks a bit about the origins of Linux, how much he hated working with OpenVMS at university, and how much of a breath of fresh air Unix was. The reason he liked Unix so much was that "you could understand the whole system. Maybe you don't know exactly how the startup system works right now, but if you need to know then you just go in there and figure it out".

This fairly accurately describes why I generally prefer systems like Void (including for my daily desktop). Alpine has a similar experience (although I hate OpenRC), as do the BSD systems (mostly; there's some ridiculous historical complexity here).

Artix is great IMO. You can choose your init system. It's not for your grandmother perhaps. It's a rolling distro like Manjaro and I think it generally benefits from the Arch ecosystem. I only really notice it getting better since I've been using it for the last 3-4 years. The change to using pipewire for sound was unpleasant and the one other major problem I had was Chromium breaking Signal for a time. Everything else has been happiness.

> Slackware is the best example - one release per decade means it is factually dead

As a daily user of slack I find your statement quite interesting.

If you run "-current", all your programs are up to date, and you get new releases much sooner than any debian variant.

First on-topic, you can use runnit on Slackware: https://slackbuilds.org/repository/15.0/system/runit/

Now another point of view :)

As a Slackware I stick with release because it is extremely stable and my main System (Thinkpad W541) works fast as most modern systems with 16G mem and 8 CPUs. If I ever got a brand new system (doubtful), I would use current until the next release.

Also, I like the fact I do not have to install patches every other day. Plus PV keeps the applications I use most up to date in Release.

That is the good thing about Slackware, you have current for the adventitious and release for people like me. And both you admin the exact same way.

FWIW, I use regular Window Managers as opposed to desktops and my main programs are Emacs (latest version), vim (close to the latest), Firefox (latest), mutt, tin, irssi and some games that come with KDE.

> Slackware is the best example - one release per decade means it is factually dead,

In slackware's case it just means most users have switched to the rolling release model of the -current branch really.

Non-useful distros become unmaintained, that's how things are, regardless of service supervision. If you want a maintained non-systemd distro, try Alpine Linux.

Void is pretty well maintained, as of lately, and did not give me any headaches for last several years. That's a lot for a bleeding-edge rolling-release distro. Yes, its my daily driver.

(Alpine is great, but I did not try it as a daily driver, it's sort of not intended for that, it seems.)

> (Alpine is great, but I did not try it as a daily driver, it's sort of not intended for that, it seems.)

I can't say what it's "intended" for, but I run stock Alpine on a desktop and a laptop, and postmarketos (an Alpine derivative) on another laptop, and I assure you it works great as a daily driver.

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